Lincoln Letters

Page Two

Mrs. Clark to pay hers, and three to old Billy Flanders, so you see now if I can accomplish much with only Two Dollars and 20 cents, I shall be entitled to some notoriety for my proneness toward an art which has proven to have been successful heretofore, alone with “Captain Simon Suggs,” formerly of the “Tallapoosa Volunteers.” After doing all this, I determined to feel and be stingy for a time, but could not hold out, I gave one of my two dollars to Neal Stewart to help purchase a Blanket for his brother Nathan, who is in Appling County under Capt. Guyton, on the line of the Rail Road, held ready to defend Brunswick or other portions of the Georgia Sea Coast. I felt that my daughter, and indeed the other pretty girls at Macon College could proceed with their studies (in safety and quietness, so far) through the patriotism, in part, of the aforesaid Nathan, who loves his country perhaps, second only to a drink of “ball face whiskey,” and I mention this to show or illustrate the fact that the advantages enjoyed in a Country are secured by the exertions of those who are debased as well as by those also who are more exalted, and therefore we should have the greater charity in our hearts. [1]

Footnotes

[1] “Captain Simon Suggs” was a southern literary character whose creator, Johnson Jones Hooper, featured as the central protagonist in numerous satirical stories depicting frontier life in the antebellum southern southwest (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas). Hooper’s most famous collection of Suggs stories are found in Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs: Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with “Taking the Census,” and Other Alabama Sketches, published in 1846. The railroad line in Appling County was part of the Macon & Brunswick Railroad.